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Review: Manga Classics: The Scarlet Letter

Manga Classics: The Scarlet Letter Manga Classics: The Scarlet Letter by Stacy King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the second Manga Classic I’ve read by Udon Entertainment, the first one being their adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. I was slightly worried going into this that I wouldn’t like it as much as I adored P&P, but I was pleasantly surprised!

Once again, going into this I had not previously read the source material, so I can’t speak to it’s accuracies. What I can say is that I was able to follow the story, and at no point was I ever confused as to what was going on, which was good. The artist, SunNeko Lee, did a really good job portraying the characters emotions and evoking emotions in the reader (me). Judging by the way the characters speak, I feel like I would have had a hard time focusing on reading the original text, so this was a good alternative.

In terms of art, it’s a typical shoujo looking art style (minus the sparkles). It’s the art style you probably think of when you hear “anime”. At first I didn’t really care for it, but by the end I garnered more appreciation for it. There were lots of double page spreads which I always love, even though they were a bit tarnished by the fact I was reading this on my tablet. With that being said, the double page spreads were positioned well enough that I could always still get the effect of the spread, which was awesome. A lot of times spreads can be properly ruined if you’re not reading from a physical book.

As far as negatives go, I can only think of one thing that might be a negative depending on who you are. There’s supposed to be a bit of a mystery about who the main character’s partner in crime is, but the second we see them we already know it’s them. It gets properly revealed near the end, but until then I was always just thinking, “We all know it’s you!!!!!!!!!!” every time they showed up. So this might be a bit of a negative if the authors were actually trying to go for suspense or mystery. In the end this didn’t actually even bother me though. It actually felt a bit exciting, like I knew a secret and I was watching to see which characters would figure it out. In that aspect, good job authors!

Overall good book. Four and not five stars just because I really liked it, but there wasn’t that final spark to push it up to five stars. I want to start collecting the physical copies now, damn it.

I received an ARC of this from the publisher via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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